The background description provided herein is for the purpose of generally presenting the context of the disclosure. Work of the presently named inventors, to the extent it is described in this background section, as well as aspects of the description that may not otherwise qualify as prior art at the time of filing, are neither expressly nor impliedly admitted as prior art against the present disclosure.
As the value and use of information continues to increase, individuals and businesses seek additional ways to process and store information. One option available to users is information handling systems. An information handling system generally processes, compiles, stores, and/or communicates information or data for business, personal, or other purposes thereby allowing users to take advantage of the value of the information. Because technology and information handling needs and requirements vary between different users or applications, information handling systems may also vary regarding what information is handled, how the information is handled, how much information is processed, stored, or communicated, and how quickly and efficiently the information may be processed, stored, or communicated. The variations in information handling systems allow for information handling systems to be general or configured for a specific user or specific use such as financial transaction processing, airline reservations, enterprise data storage, or global communications. In addition, information handling systems may include a variety of hardware and software components that may be configured to process, store, and communicate information and may include one or more computer systems, data storage systems, and networking systems.
In many information handling systems, and particularly those consisting of or comprising data storage systems or appliances, batteries or battery packs are often used as part of a protection mechanism for critical cached data. Such a conventional protection mechanism typically consists of some sort of high speed volatile storage (e.g., DRAM), some sort of slower non-volatile storage, an energy source, and logic and data-movement elements. The protection is generally provided by utilizing the logic elements to migrate or de-stage data from volatile memory to non-volatile memory. In many cases, the energy source must be rather large in order to handle the time constraints on relocation of thousands of megabytes of data from the volatile storage to non-volatile storage.
Historically, large external uninterruptable power supplies (UPSs) have been utilized to keep not only the cached data, but the entire system running during a power failure. This poses challenges, as the capacity of the energy source increases to account for larger memory sizes, which in turn increases the potential for single points of failure within the energy subsystem and the corresponding exposure to data loss upon its failure. In traditional battery pack designs, these failures can exhibit in the form of shorts, and life and balancing problems, thus affecting battery cells.
Furthermore, traditional battery pack designs for many popular battery chemistries require conditioning and “learn” behaviors to gauge cell life. In many instances, this conditioning generally involves discharging a significant portion of the stored energy, which usually requires the caching mechanism to be shut down for an extended period of time, often ranging from several minutes to several hours. When the caching mechanism is shutdown during this conditioning, system capability is typically impacted, resulting in lower performance and poor customer experiences.
Thus, there is a need in the art for a scalable, highly available, modular battery system. Particularly, there is a need in the art for a battery pack design that is flexible, with multiple cell chemistry types, and is fault tolerant, serviceable, and reduces or eliminates the performance impact of conditioning or learn behaviors.